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Help! I broke my system I suppose :oops:
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Azaghal
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 02 May 2003
Posts: 103

PostPosted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 5:02 pm    Post subject: Help! I broke my system I suppose :oops: Reply with quote

Right, I'll start from the start.
I had the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=""... uncommented for a while (I believe since first install), until I decided it was way too tricky and dangerous, for a very little gain.

So I commented it out again, synced, and -u world'ed. Big mistake I suppose. since it broke down half-way on gimp. I was like, wtf is this, and at some point I wanted to edit a config file to see what was going on, when I got: "vi: GLIBC not availble", or something in that style.

I immeadiately smelled trouble, and the system also had like 20 files needing updating in /etc according to /etc. I manually fixed them hand by hand.

Still didn't fix. Then I was like, hey, I'll just unmerge glibc and remerge it! Bad idea, lol. :oops: After the unmerge litteraly EVERYTHING was broken.

After reading up some threads, I figured I appearently must've downgraded my system, with destructive results for namely glibc. I was with the wrong assumption that: commenting back the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS wouldn't downgrade anything, merely would have a delay because it had to catch up with stable.

Anyway, what to do now? I *could* go and reinstall everything for the third time, or is there anyway using the live cd to restore functionality?

Sorry for another 'I fked up my system because I wasn't being careful' thread. :roll:
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Pythonhead
Developer
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Joined: 16 Dec 2002
Posts: 1801
Location: Redondo Beach, Republic of Calif.

PostPosted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 6:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not to clear on the order of events, such as how long you had "~x86" or "x86", but it doesn't look good.

If you have a live-cd you could boot up and extract the necessary glibc files into your messed up system, but I'm not sure that'd work.

What version of glibc did you have before it broke and what version did you install that broke it? I'm guessing you downgraded?
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Azaghal
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 02 May 2003
Posts: 103

PostPosted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 8:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

well the functionality was fine as long as I had ACCPET_KEYWORDS uncommented. as soon as I commented that line, and synced + emerge -u world, things broke.

Most apps (but not emerge for example) complained: "GLIBC: library not found" or something like that. I then thought I'd unmerge glibc and remerge it. But as soon as I unmerged glibc my system was non functional and pretty much useless, nothing works.

I suppose I'm just gonna reinstall everything.
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Pythonhead
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Joined: 16 Dec 2002
Posts: 1801
Location: Redondo Beach, Republic of Calif.

PostPosted: Sat Jun 21, 2003 9:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This may do it for you:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=29805&highlight=glibc
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MacFlecknoe
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Joined: 11 Feb 2003
Posts: 189
Location: Ann Arbor, MI

PostPosted: Sun Jun 22, 2003 7:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dude, just so you know you aren't alone. I tried upgrading to the unstable branch and the same thing happend... portage updated gcc and failed on gimp and BAM... dead system.

The above instructions did nothing to help.

Im in the middle of trying to reinstal GEntoo now... expect f@!#!@#! portmap keeps failing...; man, this is sad.
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Lv
Retired Dev
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Joined: 22 Jun 2003
Posts: 352

PostPosted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 12:10 am    Post subject: o.0 Reply with quote

wow... you really did a number on your system there. cant really blame you tho, they really dont put enough warnings about this in make.conf. but to bring you up to speed, once you have upgraded glibc anything you install after that upgrade will not work with a previous version of glibc, and so you can expect serious breakage if you downgrade glibc. the c library is the heart of your system and everything depends on it.

to give you an example, gtk applications use functions defined in the gtk library, and so they depend on gtk since it contains the actual code that needs to be run and NOT the application. The application just has a pointer saying what function it wants to use and what library should have it. the linking process handles the rest, figures out what file needs to be looked in for this code, and runs it (this is a dramatic over-simplification here). This is how libraries work. it allows for a simplification in code maintainance, a reduction of disk and memory usage, and allows for much faster application development, as well as increased portability.

Now imagine this on a much greater scale. it would greatly enhance portability if the libraries and applications themselves didnt have to know about the specifics of every machine, configuration, kernel type and version, implementation details, etc etc etc in every one of an almost infinite number of configurations it may want to run on. this is to a great degree handled by the c library. this is how things work. every library and application on your system eventually makes calls to the c library, regardless of whether or not they are programmed in c. for the most core low level things the code is held in the c library and not anywhere else, the libraries and applications MUST make calls to the c library for these things.

the c library is the most important part of your system next to the kernel and defines how everything will work together (in userspace), how things interface with the kernel, your (userspace) threading implementation, etc etc etc and on and on and on.

I hope this gives you a general idea of the importance of glibc, and for those of you who have a deep understanding of the subject please forgive my extreme simplification and glossing over of many details.

You never want to uninstall glibc. You never want to downgrade glibc. You also never want buggy code in your glibc as it will effect your entire system. much much care needs to be had when dealing with glibc.
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Xiderpunk
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 05 Mar 2003
Posts: 149
Location: London, UK

PostPosted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 9:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I sympathise having had this problem once myself. I spent a couple of days trying various suggestions and hacks to no avail.

Sadly this is reinstall time..

The one thing I learnt was to always study the emerge -Up world list carefully to see if anything major might get upgraded.
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Azaghal
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 02 May 2003
Posts: 103

PostPosted: Tue Jun 24, 2003 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I reinstalled now, not a big deal, I of course made my careful backups. :)

And yes I was very well aware glibc is important, but the problem was I didn't really know how dangerous it was going from unstable to stable, I blindly trusted it wouldn't downgrade stuff. :roll:

Thanks for the tips&advise though. :)
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Xiderpunk
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 05 Mar 2003
Posts: 149
Location: London, UK

PostPosted: Tue Jun 24, 2003 4:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Glad to hear your now up and running.
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